Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, two great American thinkers and writers, were pivotal members of the nineteenth-century transcendentalist movement. Heavily influenced by Indian religions and thought, the group believed that society had corrupted the spirit, and thus, individuals were pure only when completely self-reliant. Thoreau read the Bhagavad Gita at Walden Pond, where he wrote his seminal volume. Mahatma Gandhi later modeled his own satyagraha and passive resistance campaigns on transcendentalism, in particular Thoreau’s essay, “Civil Disobedience” (1849).